


Stone Walls

by wynnesome



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Established Relationship, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Tony Stark Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 23:51:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17131046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnesome/pseuds/wynnesome
Summary: The charred, blackened thing he still wore was what should have been his wedding suit.





	1. that doesn't love a wall

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by, and chapter titles taken from, [Robert Frost's "Mending Fences."](http://www.52insk.com/footnotes-to-slovak-culture/robert-frost/)
> 
> Very much appreciation to the lovely [Antrodemus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antrodemus) for beta reading and thoughtful discussion of words, concept, and format.
> 
> I've tagged "Chose Not to Warn" because none of the big warnings truly apply, but they're approached. There are no deaths of the story's major characters. There are deaths (plural) significant to the major characters, which take place offscreen, with none of the deceased being named. There are some descriptions pertaining to the aftermath that I hope are vivid, but no actual graphic depictions of violence or injury.
> 
> This fic was inspired by the MCU Stony Discord’s 500-member celebration challenge, with the prompt “Take off the Suit.” It outgrew the 501-word limit, and I let it. I’ve been struggling and failing so hard with short-form writing that it felt like a greater accomplishment to me to let this take shape and stand as a 1-2k-ish fic, than to pare it down to a barebones, 501-word version for the event collection.
> 
> As I wrote it, I also began to feel like the first chapter might actually be a 616-Tony, while the second chapter felt like it remained MCU. It's not set at any particular point in any canon, and any universe-affiliation is frankly pretty ambiguous, but these are the authorial feelings I had, so I tagged for both.
> 
> As far as the original prompt: I was looking for an atypical way to utilize the theme, and came up with this concept. It occurred to me that there were two different ways I could set up the conflict, and I outlined notes for both. Instead of making a final choice between them and discarding one, I decided to write them both, the “A” and “B” versions, or as I started calling them, the “T” and “S” versions. My original idea became Chapter 1. The "alternate" take became Chapter 2, which isn't a complete stand-alone, but it should be pretty clear where it picks up and diverges, and the direction things are headed.
> 
> Why not. Different pain, more pain. :D I’ve been talking about writing something angsty for a while, too, so this little piece has unexpectedly turned out to fill a couple of my ongoing writing goals, which is really nice, considering my frustration levels with my WIPs over the past few months.

The charred, blackened thing he still wore was what should have been his wedding suit. Tattered and singed, its once-fine weave was caulked with a stomach-roiling charnel taste and stench, with patches of weeping, raw flesh showing through like innards. Viscera, exposed by what had burned and crumbled away.

Sweat-drenched till the hellfire had boiled them down to salt-crusted skins, they'd dug through the rubble for hours, toiling and lifting, heaving stone and sifting through the grisly reduction, doggedly running to ground every last sign and spark of life that technology and supranatural senses could glean. It was putrid, soul-killing labor, an excavation that ground down skin, armor, and spirit.

They'd been silent since the search for survivors was called off. Now they spoke with rusty copper lips and soot-dry tongues.

"They were there because of _me_!” Tony's anguish tore out, wet and viscous as blood-soaked ash.

Anger and hurt flared and extinguished in Steve's eyes.

"Us, Tony. If this is your fault, it's mine just as much. More, even. I'm the one who wanted the church wedding."

"But I'm the one who said yes.”

...to the proposal, to the first date, to _them_ , to letting Steve in and letting him stay, when to his foundation, he'd known better...

Said yes, and taken it a step, a few light-years, further. Picked the spot, insisted on flying everyone out, made a... a pageant of it. Thrown his _money_ at it, the same way he always did, the same old cover-up for being of no inherent worth in himself, the same old delusion that he could give any gift that wasn't a curse.

"So it's... all of this, this is all something you _allowed_.”

Blurrily, he realized that Steve had no way of following the rail-switches of his thoughts, but it didn't matter. The disappointment, the reproach, the resignation, all etched an extra layer over the grime and exhaustion already smearing the geometry of his features.

Inevitable.

"I didn't... but I... just, it's my fault, Steve, can't you see that?"  He was wooden and weary, and he was begging.

He had the feeling that this time, Steve wasn't trying to make him unshoulder his guilt, but to shoulder his own way into it beside him. He couldn't allow that. The idea was intolerable. This wasn't a load that was halved in the sharing; the furthest thing from it. Crippling enough, the knowledge that he'd brought this down upon them. He couldn't bear for it to reflect upon Steve. For any scrap of blame this caused Steve to take up, it only compounded the magnitude of Tony's own wrongdoing, his failure, even further.

Still, with every fiber of his shrapnel-rent heart, he would have rather been happy than right. But that had never been a choice his life had left him. That was fine; he understood it like a mathematical constant. He'd just wanted to make _Steve_ happy, to give him everything, even if it meant committing the cardinal sin of trying to accept that his own fulfillment was required in order to make it possible.

And now he'd lost Steve everything, again, instead.

The smart missiles had done their work with devastating, unerring precision.

The nature of the strike told it all. They'd wanted torment. Grievous injury, and the agonizing hope of survivors. Whether or not there were any was of no relevance.

One direct hit could have atomized the building and everyone inside. Instead, they'd sent a pair, guided to two points at just enough distance to turn the surrounding meadowside into a heaving pit, demolishing the stone-hewn structure in a fountain of roaring rockfall.

By fifteen minutes before the ceremony, the guests would all have been gathered, mostly seated, perhaps a few still milling, the pews lining them into orderly rows queued for the slaughter.

The only ones left outside the blast radius had been the wedding couple.

En route, they’d heard the booms and rounded the bend to destruction. Tony had skidded them to a screeching, fishtailing halt, and been knee-deep in rubble, scrabbling with bloodied fingers, before he’d realized that the sharper sound hitting his ears through the screaming of his own voice was Steve’s, shouting at him to call the armor.

~~*~~

His best man had walked in that morning to find them laying out their suits and accessories together, and thrown up his hands.

"Oh, sugarbear, honeypuff, that whole thing about not seeing each other the day of the wedding is nothing but an old wives' tale -- and if you hadn't noticed, there's not a _wife_ to be seen." Tony had rolled his eyes and batted aside the feeble protest with a leer and a lazy drawl. "Steve and I see each other every day. As much of each other as possible. That goes double --  make that squared -- for today,” he’d smirked, jostling Rhodey with a playful nudge to the shoulder, while Steve shrugged with a smug little grin, the color high in his cheeks.

Tony had known full well that Rhodey didn't actually believe the silly notion, and had just been trying to keep him and Steve from getting caught up in each other and losing track of the time. And of course that was exactly what had happened, when helping each other dress had, unsurprisingly, turned into extended foreplay for the honeymoon.

Had _they_ known, had they guessed, Tony wondered, the sickening questions yawing and pitching through the gaping chasm in his mind. He thought, probably. He thought, it'd been win-win for them, strike down all of the Avengers and their community circle at once, or... leave the two of them stranded like this. Orphaned, amputated.

They. The perpetrators. Far too sanitized and clinical a word. But the bottom line was, they didn't know yet who was responsible. Investigation... was a thing for some undefined _later_. As was whatever form of reckoning there would be. If it was even worth the effort.

Tony had always tried to shy away from the knowledge that Avenging didn't undo, couldn't bring back.

Something else Tony knew, with a fervent certainty that fell somewhere between faith and superstition, was whose name had been imprinted on those rockets, the malingering half-life of the youth he'd spent pre-packaging vessels of death.

Even this many years later, what should have been two decades dull of the cutting edge, no one had ever made them like he had.

Now he and Steve were split asunder where they should have been joined in love and joy. The objection had been heard. The peace had not been held.

Their dialogue, such as it was, had choked to a halt, as though the brief exchange had consumed the last vapors of their shared reserves.

Another brittle silence hung between them, grey and dull as the flecks that littered their hair and drifted loose, as the pallor that blanched the planes and grooves of their faces. Massive and dense as their grief, with nothing left to fuel its outlet, that mounded within and between them like psychic slag heaps.

They finished stripping with eyes that wavered between wounded and dead, that grazed and slithered away from one another like beads of mercury, tantalizing and toxic.

Naked, Steve half-raised a hand, then let it drop. Good, Tony thought, he understood. Comfort was beyond their reach.

Tony wasn't deserving, and -- Steve was, but for it to come from him would be a travesty. Like breaking someone's bones just to play the hero for knowing how to splint them. Just add it to the list. Steve had always deserved things that Tony didn't have within him to give.

Filthy and aching, stilted as ancient, aged men, they lurched into the Olympic-sized shower to wash away what would have been their life together.

Pounding water debrided the scorched-earth remains of their matrimony. A silty pool rose slowly over their feet, the detritus sluicing off them faster than the pummeling streams could drive it down the drain.

The shower had four jets. The two in use were the furthest apart.


	2. that wants it down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conversation could have gone a little differently.  
> Funny how it's always Tony getting the blame, no matter the source.
> 
> Or, the "what if"/"b-side"/"Version S (for Steve)." 
> 
> This chapter isn't a full stand-alone alternate version of the story, but picks up and diverges at a pretty obvious point. I didn't add an ending, but just assume it's headed in the same general direction as how things go post-dialogue in Chapter 1.

They'd been silent since the search for survivors was called off. The flight home was accomplished mostly by JARVIS, via the suit's auto-pilot. The pressure sensors showed that Steve's hands were locked around the built-in grips as securely as ever, but rather than molding himself lovingly as usual against the contours of the metal, the hang of his weight bowed as decidedly far from his armored transport as he could hold himself and not fall out of the sky.

Something was wrong. Behind the faceplate, Tony felt his face screw itself up, grotesquely squeeze and twist, a thin tugging at the corners of his eyes and the back of his throat. Something? _Everything_ was... their whole world had gone dark-mirror, jagged, shatter-crazed.

But something was _wrong_.

He tried to push his sluggish, halting thoughts around the edges of what could be affecting Steve exactly this way, but he couldn't process; his mind wouldn't do more than brush against it, just slipped and slid away, like trying to reach through murky water to grasp something else already liquid.

Steve stepped off onto thin air with Tony still a good two feet from hitting the landing pad, and a slight stagger to his knees as he absorbed the impact of boots to concrete gave away the degree of his exhaustion. The moment Tony cleared the disassembly rig, he shambled after, on a straight-line course to their bathroom.

When he stepped through the door, a few seconds off the pace, Steve had the shower started, and was facing into the room. He acknowledged Tony with a turn of his head, his body following. He was grim-faced, lips pressed tight, and eyes hard, still wearing his full tac-suit, but several of the panels were unfastened, with straps dangling. Tony could see him tight with containing an unhealthy vibration, the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head minutely awry, like mismatched parts all out of alignment and barely staying glued.

It hadn't been long enough for the water to steam up the room, but the air felt thickened, inflexible to Tony anyway, like he should be reluctant to breathe; like every pull of his lungs was disturbing some precarious balance of pressure, and the whole space was about to implode.

He ached, he prickled, his throat was stuck to itself, his stomach a sinkhole, his head spinning with white noise and a black pit.

He watched Steve draw a long breath through his nose, and it happened.

"You know they were all there because of _you_."

Impact. Blank. Blank. Whiteout.

Crumple.

Tony was down, outside himself.

In training, he had always told Steve not to hold back so much, that he could take the hits.

No, he couldn't.

There was no point, no place, for another breath. The rest of his chest had just filled with metal.

He was a dead man, talking.

"Me... But we were there to... Us... together--"

"You had to do it, didn't you. Put it on the map. Fly everyone out. Throw your goddamned _money_ around. If you hadn't insisted on making a pageant of it... this wasn't about  _us_ anymore," Steve spat, low, blunt, and brutal, like there was anything left for force to accomplish. He hadn't even raised his voice. Steve was often many kinds of loud, but that had nothing to do with what made him dangerous.

Too blindsided to even wrap his arms around himself, Tony just stood there, wide open and defenseless, disembodied.

The water was still running. The room had grown warmer. His logic ran cold.

"What, you'd rather it'd happened in middle of the city?"

Steve glared back his reply, his eyes boring and cauterizing holes.

"No, you don't. You don't get to try to make this better, talk it into a silver lining."

Steve was right, though, of course he was. Steve was the one who'd wanted a church wedding, but Tony was the one who had said yes. To everything. The proposal. The first date. Said yes to _them_ , to letting them try, even though to his foundation, he knew better. He'd just wanted to make Steve happy, to give him everything, even if it meant committing the cardinal sin of accepting that his own fulfillment was required for it to be possible.

He'd rather have been happy than right, but that wasn't a choice his life had ever handed him. And now he'd lost Steve everything, again. Their friends, their team, their... he doubled over and retched once, tasted bile, forced himself to straighten.

The mirror had fogged over. Steve wasn't looking at him anymore. He wasn't looking at himself, either.


End file.
